Empower

How We Empower

When we started, no one handed us a playbook for Horizon Europe.We built one — through years of proposals, rejections, and hard-won successes. Now we make it available to researchers, institutions, and cities ready to compete at the European level.

Flagship Event

Horizon Europe Summit

Where Consortia Are Born

The Horizon Europe Summit is our flagship event, an annual gathering designed around one outcome: new project partnerships. Not panels for the sake of panels. Not networking over bad coffee. Every session, from keynotes to workshops, is built to move people from “interesting idea” to “let's write a proposal together.”

38+
Expert Speakers
200+
Participants
5+
Consortia Formed
Zagreb
Location
2025

Cities as Living Labs for Innovation

The second Summit brought together 15 expert speakers — National Contact Points, Full Professors, EU project coordinators — for a day of structured matchmaking and project brainstorming in Zagreb. The city itself served as a live case study for urban innovation. The CORIB matchmaking event held during the Summit produced five new Horizon Europe consortia with embedded ORRI principles — proof that the format works.

Key Facts

15 expert speakers
Structured matchmaking for upcoming Horizon Europe calls
Project brainstorming workshops with facilitated consortium formation
Partners: Crowdhelix, City of Zagreb
2024

Horizon Europe Summit — Inaugural Edition

The first time we hosted the Horizon Europe Summit, we brought together over 250 participants and featured distinguished speakers from academia, industry and government across a two-day programme. The inspiration for the first conference of its kind in South-East Europe? The €95.5 billion Horizon Europe Programme for research and innovation. The summit served as a place for the exchange of experience, fostering new partnerships and supporting Croatian entities in becoming part of Horizon Europe experience. A key highlight was the matchmaking event, where international consortia were formed, bringing together Croatian and international partners and initiating the development of new and innovative project proposals.

Key Facts

23 expert speakers, over 200 participants
Representatives of 19 European universities and research organisations
Matchmaking event — new consortiums established
Partners: Crowdhelix

What's Next

Each year, the conference selects a new sub-theme in line with the trends in the research and innovation ecosystem, and brings together international experts. HES showcases the success of previous editions by presenting award-winning Horizon Europe projects resulting from the matchmaking part of the conference.

Strategic Consulting

What We’ve Learned, Applied to Your Challenges

We don't sell consulting as a product. We apply what we know from running our own projects — writing proposals that got funded, managing multi-country international consortia, taking a research idea from low TRL to industrial validation. That experience is what sits behind every engagement.

We work with universities, research organisations, cities, and SMEs who are serious about European R&I but need a partner who's actually been through it.

EU Funding Strategy

Figuring out which calls to apply for is the easy part. The harder question is how to position your organisation so that your proposal stands out in a pile of 200 others. We help with the entire process - call scouting, programme analysis, and the kind of strategic framing that comes from knowing what evaluators actually reward.

Proposal Development

We co-develop proposals from the inside - scientific content, consortium architecture, work package logic, budget justification. We sit with your team, understand your research, and build a proposal that reads like it was written by the people who will execute it.

Grant Office Setup

Some institutions have world-class researchers but no infrastructure for EU funding. We've seen this across the Western Balkans and widening countries. We help build it — workflows, internal processes, staff training — so that your first Horizon Europe success becomes a repeatable pattern, not a lucky break.

Exploitation Planning

We've taken our own research from a university lab to a product approaching market launch. That journey, with all its dead ends and course corrections, is what teaches us the most about the exploitation strategies we design for our clients.

AI Development Solutions

Custom Intelligence Built on Proven Technology

eSARP isn't just our product — it's a platform. The explainable AI architecture we developed for manufacturing decision-making can be adapted, extended, and applied to new domains and new challenges.

We work with companies and institutions that need AI solutions they can actually understand and trust — not black-box models, but systems that explain their reasoning, align with human oversight, and meet the transparency requirements that European regulation is moving towards.

Custom AI Solutions

We develop tailored explainable AI systems built on the same architecture behind eSARP. Whether the challenge you're facing is process optimisation, predictive decision-making, or knowledge capture in expert-dependent environments, we research how industries resolve issues and build solutions based on that.

eSARP Integration

For manufacturing companies looking to deploy eSARP or adapt it to their specific production environment, we provide end-to-end integration support — from MES connectivity and data pipeline setup to scenario modelling and operator training.

AI Strategy & Feasibility

Not every problem needs an AI solution. We help organisations assess where explainable AI can add real value, what data infrastructure is needed, and what a realistic development roadmap looks like — based on our own experience of building one from scratch.

Education & Training

Practical Knowledge from People Who’ve Done It

We run workshops and training programmes for researchers, project managers, and institutional leaders who already have the theoretical knowledge and want to get better at European R&I. We gather practical knowledge from people who write proposals, manage consortia, and build products from research and who remember what it was like to do it for the first time.

Proposal Writing Masterclass

We know how evaluators think and we know how to get their attention. Participants work on real proposal concepts, from call analysis through work package design to budget justification, and get structured feedback from people who've been on both sides of the evaluation process.

From National Grants to Horizon Europe

The biggest barrier for newcomers is the gap between how national grants work and what Horizon Europe expects. Different evaluation logic, different consortium dynamics, different writing styles. This programme closes that gap for researchers making the leap.

Research Exploitation Workshop

Based on our own journey from university research to a market-ready AI platform. A practical workshop where participants map out realistic exploitation pathways for their own project results, identify barriers early, and build plans that survive contact with reality.

Project Management for EU Projects

Running a 10-partner consortium across 5 countries is nothing like managing a national research grant. Different reporting, different partner dynamics, different risks. This programme gives project managers the tools and frameworks to keep complex EU projects moving.

Tailored Institutional Programmes

We know that every institution is different and requires custom programmes. So, whether you're a university, national agency, R&D team or a city administration, we start with an honest assessment of where you are, we identify the real gaps and deliver training that builds lasting capacity rather than checking a box.

Custom Workshops

Need something specific? We design and deliver bespoke workshops built around your team's context — whether that's preparing for a specific call, upskilling a new grants office, or embedding exploitation thinking into an ongoing project.

The Common Thread

One Playbook. Three Ways In.

The Summit, the consulting, the AI solutions, the training — they all draw from the same source. A decade of proposals written, projects managed, a company spun off from a university lab, an AI platform built from scratch, and a network built across 19 countries. We didn't learn this from a textbook. We learned it by doing — and by getting it wrong often enough to know what right looks like.

Whether you show up at the Summit, bring us into your project, or deploy our AI in your factory - you're accessing that same body of knowledge, tailored to your needs.